control and the ability to wait

NB: My voice can be heard in the italics.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Self-control. Not exercising it is, as Coleridge implies, like waking up with a bad bad hangover. It's not a concept that I've spent too much time thinking about. It's a word I understand but how - 'self control is the thing people do to control themselves'. Sure. That's hardly even a dictionary definition of the word.

Wikipedia says: "Self control is the exertion of one's own will on their personal self - their behaviors, actions, thought processes. Much of this comes from the perception of self and the ability to set up boundaries for that self. Self-control can be expanded into several different areas, ranging from respect to willpower. People demonstrate great differences in their level of self-control. It can be affected because of illness and past experiences and it can be improved through the course of life."

Walter Michel's experiment on self-control is nicely described in this article:

Self-control is the key to success - David Brooks, The San Francisco Chronicle. May 9, 2006.

AROUND 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn't ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes -- desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years later and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32. (….)

Yet the Mischel experiments, along with everyday experience, tell us that self-control is essential. Young people who can delay gratification can sit through sometimes boring classes to get a degree. They can perform rote tasks in order to, say, master a language. They can avoid drugs and alcohol. For people without self-control skills, however, school is a series of failed ordeals. No wonder they drop out. Life is a parade of foolish decisions: teenage pregnancy, drug use, gambling, truancy and crime.

If you're a policymaker and you are not talking about core psychological traits such as delayed gratification skills, then you're just dancing around with proxy issues. The research we do have on delayed gratification tells us that differences in self-control skills are deeply rooted but also malleable. Differences in the ability to focus attention and exercise control emerge very early, perhaps as soon as nine months. But there is no consensus on how much of the ability to exercise self-control is hereditary and how much is environmental.

The ability to delay gratification, like most skills, correlates with socioeconomic status and parenting styles. Children from poorer homes do much worse on delayed gratification tests than children from middle-class homes. That's probably because children from poorer homes are more likely to have their lives disrupted by marital breakdown, violence, moving, etc. They think in the short term because there is no predictable long term.

The good news is that while differences in the ability to delay gratification emerge early and persist, that ability can be improved with conscious effort. Moral lectures don't work. Sheer willpower doesn't seem to work either. The children who resisted eating the marshmallow didn't stare directly at it and exercise iron discipline. On the contrary, they were able to resist their appetites because they were able to think about other things.

What works, says Jonathan Haidt, the author of "The Happiness Hypothesis," is creating stable, predictable environments for children, in which good behavior pays off -- and practice. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self-control get better at it.

This pattern would be too obvious to mention if it weren't so largely ignored by educators and policymakers. Somehow we've entered a world in which we obsess over structural reforms and standardized tests, but skirt around the moral and psychological traits that are at the heart of actual success. Mischel tried to interest New York schools in programs based on his research. Needless to say, he found almost no takers.

(To read full article, visit: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/09/EDGFGINST41.DTL)


It's something we learn as early as 9 months. But I do think a lot of self-control is rooted in religion - atleast from where I'm looking. I'm a Sikh. This rather young religion had grand goals - among others, to eliminate the caste system, to shun meaningless rituals... But along with those, our Guru asked us not to fast. God cannot be found in hunger. The ideal behind it is wonderful, but something I am finding today is that Sikhs as a people have been tagged as self-indulgent. We're big drinkers, we love to eat, we love to host and we celebrate long and hard and grandly. None of these are such terrible things, I'm a particular kind of hedonist myself. But I do find myself at a disadvantage today. While it was my mother who taught me plenty of self-control ("only one coca-cola a week" and "no getting up until you eat all your vegetables"), we left her grasp early. And I find I am in a place where I cannot refuse myself very easily.

I spoke of religion because everytime a Muslim friend of mine tells me about how much self-control he has, he says, "When I fast, it doesn't matter if I'm hungry, I know I cannot eat till sunset." It led me to believe that self-control is a muscle that needs training before it can be flexed and exercised... and I think some rituals/ systems help strengthen it.

There's value in delayed gratification. The pleasure of the wait some say:

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. ~C.S. Lewis

Of course I tend to ignore Lewis' use of 'good' and 'bad'. The self-indulgent don't see in stark black and white! But how exactly does one train oneself to say "no", to wait? And what is the value in that? I know there is value, but what are the exact benefits?

I crave. I want. I feel. I need.

And when I do I seek it with a single-minded, selfish stubborness. But more and more I realise that "our vices are in the morning after we have committed them". And that gets tiring after a while.

Thoughts, anyone?